Tags: france (99 pics) The Seine (French pronunciation: [la sɛn]) is a slow-flowing major river and commercial waterway within the regions of Île-de-France and Haute-Normandie in France and famous as a romantic backdrop in photographs of Paris, France. It is also a tourist attraction, with excursion boats offering sightseeing tours of the Rive Droite and Rive Gauche within the city of Paris. It terminates in the Bay of the Seine region of the English Channel and is navigable by oceanic transports about ten percent of its length to Rouen, 120 km (75 miles) from the sea, whereas over sixty percent of its length from Burgundy near the Swiss Alps is negotiable by commercial riverboats and nearly its whole length is available for recreational boating. There are 37 bridges over the River Seine just within Paris and dozens more spanning the river outside of the city. Examples in Paris include the Pont Louis-Philippe and Pont Neuf, the latter which dates back to 1607 (405 years ago). Outside of the city, examples include the Pont de Normandie, one of the longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, which links Le Havre to Honfleur. Origin of the name The name "Seine" comes from the Latin Sequana, a Latinisation of the Gaulish (Celtic) Sicauna, which is argued to mean "sacred river". Some have argued that Sicauna is cognate to the name of Saône River, though an argued relationship to the River Shannon in Ireland is unlikely, given the very different forms of the two; Gaelic an tSiona, dative Sionainn is rather from Prehistoric Irish *Sinona. Another proposal has it that Sequana is the Latin version of Gaulish Issicauna Lower-Icauna, which would be the diminutive of Icauna, which was the Gaulish name of the Yonne River. Some believe the ancient Gauls considered the Seine to be a tributary of the Yonne, which indeed presents a greater average discharge than the Seine (the river flowing through Paris would be called Yonne if the standard rules of geography were applied). Some identify the river Sikanos, origin (according to Thucydides) of the Sicanoi of Sikelia (Sicily), with the river Sequana (Seine). Further downstream in what is now Normandy, the Seine, the second longest river in France, was known as Rodo, or Roto, which is a traditional Celtic name for rivers, and is also the stem of the Rhône River (see Rhône article for further explanations). This is proved by the name of Rouen, which was Rotomagos in Gaulish, meaning "Roto-field/plain" (magos in Gaulish), whose meaning evolved into "market of the Roto".

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